San Diego  A curious piece of San Diego State University’s history will have its 75th anniversary marked with a “rededication” ceremony Monday.

Aztec Bowl, the Works Progress Administration stadium that was the primary home to Aztec football teams until what is now Qualcomm Stadium opened in 1967, hosted its first game on Oct. 3, 1936.

Now, its cobblestone facade and backless concrete benches serve only as part of the foundation of Viejas Arena. The former gridiron is a parking lot and staging area for the arena.

“It’s a modern basketball arena sitting in a WPA football stadium,” said Seth Mallios, chairman of SDSU’s anthropology department.

The arena, which opened in 1997, had to be built into the old bowl with as little demolition as possible because the stadium was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.

“That compromise, preserving that early WPA history, was ingenious,” said Mallios, who serves as a campus historian and will be one of the speakers at Monday’s event. “We need to protect that past as we move forward.”

Mallios, nonetheless, has called Viejas Arena at Aztec Bowl a “bizarre-looking landmark.” He also has called it “one of the most historically intriguing and physically distinctive venues” in the country.

Over its working lifetime, the bowl played host to more than football games.

“Many aspects of the university’s history were written in Aztec Bowl,” said SDSU President Eliott Hirshman. “President Kennedy spoke there. I understand the county fair was held there once. Graduations, concerts. Of course, the football team played there for many years.”

John F. Kennedy delivered a speech and accepted an honorary doctorate in Aztec Bowl on June 6, 1963. Mallios said it was probably the combination of its WPA background and Kennedy’s appearance that won the bowl its place on the historical registry — a designation that was opposed at the time by officials on campus and at California State University headquarters. They opposed it because they feared preservation would interfere with future development, such as the arena.

“The preservation officer of the CSU submitted a petition requesting that the National Park Service review and reject the nomination to list Aztec Bowl in the national register, emphasizing that the stadium did not make an important contribution to local history, that President Kennedy spoke at many universities during his time in office and that its architecture was neither significant nor particularly reflective of social history,” Mallios wrote in a paper on the bowl.

At least one administrator does not share that view.

“It’s certainly very striking when you pull into that parking lot and see the arena sitting in the bowl,” Hirshman said. “But I like it. It’s a fusing of the traditions of the university with the aspirations of the future.”

Among the other events held at the bowl over the years were a Grateful Dead and Canned Heat concert in 1969 and then-Mayor Pete Wilson’s 40th birthday party in 1973.

The centerpiece of Monday’s event will be the reinstallation of a long-lost bronze plaque commemorating the WPA’s completion of additional work on the stadium in 1938.

It showed up at Mallios’ office last fall wrapped in masking tape. An anonymous, handwritten note explained that it had been taken in protest of the arena construction on the site of the bowl and to protect the plaque during the project, Mallios said.

The original plaque was attached to the northern edge of the east stands, next to the entrance to the bowl’s locker room and offices. That area is now a storage spot for Viejas Arena trash carts.

“Me being an anthropologist and always concerned about original context, I wanted to put it back here,” Mallios said recently, pointing to the original spot. “Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.”

The refurbished plaque will instead be mounted in the center of the remaining east stands, a more visible and accessible spot.

“And, it doesn’t smell bad there,” Mallios added.

In addition to Hirshman and Mallios, alumnus and longtime SDSU benefactor Leon Parma will speak at the rededication. Parma quarterbacked the Aztecs in the bowl from 1948 to 1950 and recalls living with about a dozen players in a line of pre-World War II trailers parked at one end of the field. “When they kicked a field goal, it hit my trailer,” he said.

Of the dedication?

“I think it’s great,” Parma said. “I think its an indication of how important Aztec Bowl has been to San Diego State and to many of us for so many years.”